New workspace, who dis?
Ok, that trope has jumped the shark. My apologies.
But you may have noticed that the way you manage projects on User Interviews looks quite different today. This is what we’re calling the new workspace—the place where you manage all aspects of a given recruit.
Why the redesign?
We’ve heard from a lot of Researchers that the previous layout was not intuitive to navigate and find what they needed. The information architecture wasn’t clear to users.
Here is a real example. A Researcher needed to update the credit card on file for a project… which was located at the bottom of a long Overview tab. It required a back and forth with our Support team to find it. 🤦
This was our fault, of course. As we kept adding new functionality, we’d awkwardly force it into an existing page. Now? There is a clear Billing section.
So the main improvement you’ll notice is the new left nav with better defined and more discrete categories. Hopefully this will make your experience a little smoother.
There is another improvement worth mentioning—you no longer need to manually refresh pages to see new participants or other updated data. We heard a lot from Researchers who would leave their project open in a tab (as one does), receive an email they had participants to review, only to be confused about why they weren’t seeing them.
The data now reloads every time you move to a new section within the workspace. This sounds small and obvious (it is, tbh). But we’re excited to save everyone the confusion and to have this work the way it should have all along.
We also did this redesign because...
More exciting improvements are looming!
This new layout unblocks a lot of other improvements we can now make based on your feedback. This is personally what I am most excited about. You all have been remarkably generous when it comes to sharing insightful and useful feedback. We’ve been dutifully categorizing it all and itching to do something with it.
So why haven’t we?
Because you all, our dear users, tend to be familiar with product development, I’m going to allow myself to break the fourth wall and explain a few behind the scenes items that also went into this new layout. I know, I know—users do not normally care about this stuff. You are not normal users.
TL;DR – the previous layout had a lot of technical debt. So in addition to upgrading the layout, we’ve also fixed up the foundation it is built on.
The new layout is built in React. We’ve been increasingly using React components in our development but the old layout was built in a way that prevented us from using them.
This created an unfortunate situation. We’d often hesitate to invest in building new solutions in the old layout because we knew it meant that we’d have to build them in a way that was inconsistent with our technical vision and force us to rebuild them in the future.
That is no longer an issue. Now that the new workspace is live, we will be getting to work addressing your feedback on things like more rescheduling flexibility, sorting and filtering the participant list, and allowing bulk actions on participants.
In fact, we’re going to be transparent about what we’re considering working on next and we want you all to be involved in helping shape those plans.
What are we planning to focus on next?
You tell us. We’ve set up a new page that displays the ideas we’re considering. You can add comments on the ones you care most about as well as suggest entirely new ideas.
